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Looking Forward with Students
Remember those first weeks of school? That time when you felt like the current class would never understand the classroom routines, and you went home exhausted from the effort of...
How Principals Can Help Build Teacher and Coach Connections
Today I visited a classroom because I needed to talk to a student about something that happened at recess. I walked up to him and whispered, “Hey, can I talk...
Puppy Chow
My little, old dog: a heartbeat at my feet. Edith Wharton One of the most essential teaching moves I make didn’t have a name until Jennifer Gonzalez “verbed” the...
Using Tech to Find Authentic Audiences for Student Writing
Stanford professor Andrea Lunsford organized a project in which she collected and analyzed almost 15,000 writing samples. They included formal (i.e., assignments, essays) and informal (i.e., emails, blog posts) examples....
Reimagining Reading Logs
“Henry, are you enjoying Mr. Popper’s Penguins?” Kate asked. She was in a third-grade classroom leading some small groups during a fiction reading unit of study. As she was coaching...
Weeding a First-Grade Library
The stack of books on my counter sat for weeks, slowly getting taller and more disheveled despite my attempts to straighten it out every few days. These books were new...
Books on a Budget
It was post-awards season. All my bookish friends were on a literary social media site, sharing their thoughts on the most recent American Library Association Youth Media Awards recipients. We...
Managing Independent Projects
If you had been able to walk around our classroom last Friday, you might have paused to see Sophie sketching a picture in a comic strip panel. As you glanced...
Literacy and Global Competence
We must build students' global connectedness as if our lives depended on it. Homa Sabet Tavangar I recently worked with an intermediate student who was upset because, he said,...
A Year of Learning About Student Refugees
I placed a pair of scissors in front of her after showing her how to match the pictures as I cut them. I waited patiently for her to pick up...
Coaching in Proximity: The Sherpa Mind-Set
Standing in the back of the room, I could see and feel the building anticipation. There was the wild-eyed look of a teacher who is no longer sure what question...
A Change in the Weather: Moving from Teacher to Coach
There’s a joke among midwesterners that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a day and it will change. Living in northern Indiana, we see the full gamut of...
A Variety of Share Sessions
Sharing in writing workshop is a powerhouse for producing energy, excitement, and new learning to sustain writers. I’ve always pressed teachers to tap into a variety of share sessions to...
A Community Reads “Wonder”
Author C. Alexander London wrote, “It’s a fact: people can survive without books. People can even have wonderful, full lives without books. But they can’t endure without community, and community...
Breakthroughs and Barriers: Going Schoolwide with a Literacy Initiative
In our move to Mineral Point, Wisconsin, we purchased an old home in very good condition. It’s a four-square home, built to last. The previous owner was diligent about improvements...
The Coconut Wireless
I am in a workshop in San Francisco, listening to a team of teachers and administrators from Hawaii talk about the power of community networks. The superintendent of a school...
When Email Isn’t Enough
I am my most concise and thorough when I communicate in writing. Experience also tells me it is important to document and archive information. Other people feel this way too,...
Embedding Reading into Staff Meetings
In a New York Times article, writer Virginia Heffernan questions the necessity of meetings. “They’re boring. They’re useless. Everyone hates them.” She interviews a number of organizational leaders about this...
The Writing Workout
I overuse it as an analogy, but it’s hard to ignore how often principles of fitness and teaching mirror each other. Recently, validation for my tendency came in the form...
Backward Chaining
For the last few weeks, I’ve been working in a fifth-grade classroom throughout a research-based essay unit. My focus has been on a group of six students who were far...
Going Google as a Literacy Leader
Our time as literacy leaders is precious. The demands of our day and our positions are limited, especially when we also have a family and a life beyond school. Productivity...
